Stalingrad – Nobody demands for Greater Germany

The battle for Stalingrad lasted long, because the German soldiers wrapped by the Red Army were obliged to persevere by Hitler. »Men are transformed into corpses. This is not unusual and is not unnatural. This happens in the course of political and warlike changes … But your men stuck in the Stallingrad quarry – it is the case that even the earth fails to them and that magpies carry their eyes, their hearts away – what do they cement, that is the question. Great Germany! Greater Germany on the Volga – … is the land of the Slavs about a well -file human plantation … a Greater Germany that extends over the east and excited to the Volga, nobody needs it and nobody needs it … even Germany is not needed. “

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Strong words, impressive scenes in “Stalingrad”, the monumental novel by Theodor Plievier, who appeared in Germany in 1945 after the war after he was first published in the German -language exile “International Literature” in Moscow in 1943/44. To write him, Plievier was able to speak to captured German soldiers. It was the first novel about the fall of the sixth German army in Stalingrad. While there is again an impending war with Russia as if this defeat should be made up for once, the author’s last version of the author’s edition appears in a new edition of the development publisher to remind us of what war means.

Carsten Gansel, who caused a sensation with a new edition of Heinrich Gerlach’s novel “breakthrough at Stalingrad” in 2016, illuminates connections in his afterword, which have so far hardly been known. After the war, Plievier went to the SBZ and worked, among other things, for the newly founded cultural association. Why did I know so little of this author? Because he had stayed away from a lecture through West Germany in autumn 1947. As is often the case in such cases, there was no longer talk about him. And when Hermann Kant told me that he wrote his diploma thesis on the novel “Stalingrad” in 1956, I didn’t notice. Carsten Gansel is now only now learning that Kant had caused a late rehabilitation of the former bestseller in 1984.

In detailed research, he followed the author’s life path, which was on the Nazis’ statement list, took part in the Soviet writer’s allunion congress in 1935, lived in the Volga -German Republic for a while and learned at close range – which meant Stalinist terror – which fell victim to 70 percent of German exile, as I read here. Also that the headquarters of the Komintern was stationed in Ufa in Bashkir, where Plievier worked for Soviet broadcasters. I always thought wrongly that he was an eyewitness to the battle for Stalingrad. Reading the novel, you have no doubt about it because nobody could come up with so many details. But he confessed very precise inquiries, spoken to many eyewitnesses. “The task that he had set up is also outrageous also the empathy, the sharp intelligence, which already grasped the essentials in the second word, the toughness and accuracy of his work,” writes Gansel.

“Soldiers are murderers,” once wrote Kurt Tucholsky. Perpetrator, whether voluntarily or under compulsion. But anyway, be it through propaganda, they are also made victims of a war machine, a battle cattle for foreign interests. Theodor Plievier minute describes the downfall of an army as a turn in the Second World War, even before the western allies opened a second front against Nazi Germany. “From now on it was the Red Army that had the upper hand. After the end of the fighting on February 2, 1943, 91,000 men were captured within a few days. ”Dying rate 90 percent – that is also not concealed here. Plievier himself puts the hair -raising processes in front of us without commenting. A large, a lasting work of anti -war literature.

Theodor Plievier: Stalingrad. Novel. Published and with an afterword by Carsten Gansel. Aufbau-Verlag, 624 pages, born, 30 €.